[ale] something's eating cycles

[Joseph A Knapka]

Jonathan Rickman wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> 
> > A stupid GUI KDE bit of software is sitting on my taskbar and monitoring
> > memory and processor useage. It nicely shows me a sad face when the
> > processor gets overloaded. cute! useful, NOT. Every once in a while it
> > pops up a window telling me that solitaire is using to much of the
> > processor or that Mozilla is doing the same. In each case neither program
> > is active, nor has been for hours. On the taskbar, but idle.
> 
> If mozilla is running, or has ran recently...regardless of whether it is
> "active" or not, that's where I'd start. I'm not trying to beat a
> dead horse. I really think that's where your problem is. Next time this
> happens, close mozilla, bring up a command prompt and run
> 'ps ax|grep mozilla-bin' without quotes and if it reports anything other
> than 'grep mozilla-bin', type 'killall -KILL mozilla'. Trust me, mozilla
> is a very ill behaved application under the vast majority of circumstances.
> Long ago I learned to always kill mozilla from the command prompt.

I agree. I use Communicator rather than Mozilla, but similar
behavior occurs. Sometimes out of the blue a Netscape process
will decide to go crazy and eat every CPU cycle it can get,
and that can happen when I haven't opened a Netscape window
in hours. It also leaks memory like a seive; the other day
it had an RSS of 80MB and a total VM size of almost 200MB.
I just kill it, remove its lock file, and restart it once
a day or so and life is (more or less) good. I've become
so used to Communicator's email, web, and news integration
that I don't want to switch to using separate apps for
those things. Is there another piece of software that does
everything as well as Netscape, but is better behaved?
(Support for a Usenet killfile would be nice, too.)

-- Joe

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